The holiday season is officially over

The last of the Quality Street have been eaten, making way for healthy eating to resume, I’ve just taken down my Christmas decorations and tomorrow I’m back at work. Now it’s time for my New Year’s resolutions to begin in earnest. My days of sleeping late, lounging around watching DVDs and not seeming to do much of anything while still surprisingly getting a few things done are over for another year. Sure, there will be weekends, but from now on they will be used to try and cram in everything that I didn’t have time for during the week.

 

In theory, if I work for 8 hours and sleep for 8 hours, I still have a whole 8 hours of me time every single day. Once you take away the time spent getting ready for work, travelling there and back and the half an hour for my lunch break, the reality is a grand total of four hours. That’s four hours into which I have to cram shopping, doing my exercise DVD, cooking tea, eating tea, housework, blogging and reading other people’s blogs (admittedly I do some of that on my lunch break because I can at least get all the blogs I read to load on the work computer!) and anything else I want to do with my evenings.

 

All work and no play… (Photo credit: tomten)

 

Work-life balance? Does not exist, in my opinion!

 

 

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Resolutions time

I am back in Karlsruhe, it’s 2013 and so it must be time to post my new year’s resolutions…

1. Get back to doing my exercise DVD. What with illness then the stress of Christmas I’ve been neglecting it lately, and I can tell! I feel weak, sluggish and some of my clothes are getting tight. Must get my Jillian on again this year!

   

   Little N Large (Photo: Will-Joel-Taylor)

    

2. Keep on top of the housework better. I’m a firm believer that life is too short to spend it cleaning, but over the past few months the flat has looked bad even by my standards.
3. Become a better translator. I want to improve my style this year and maybe get at least one or two translations back from the proofreader without any corrections or style suggestions. Maybe then I will also get to do some nice translations for a change, instead of always being responsible for the technical ones!
4. Finish visiting 30 German towns before I turn 30 and blog about them. I believe I am up to 7 blogged about (although I have visited loads more!) so I have a lot of work ahead of me…
5. Save up and do some OU courses. I have a whole list of short courses that sound interesting and this year I actually want to do a few.

That’s all. I think 5 is enough for one year!
Now that I’m back I’m going to atempt to visit all the blogs I read and see what I’ve been missing out on – providing this computer will let me! If you don’t get a comment from me it’s probably because Mr. Computer has taken a dislike to your blog and decided to freeze rather than actually loading it…

Four month review

Now that the year is one third over (What? How? Why?), it seems like a good idea to see how I’ve been doing with my resolutions for the year. Sooo lets take a look at what impossible tasks I set myself this time 😉

1. Eat more healthily! I said that this one didn’t have to involve giving up the things I love, but I did want more of our meals to feature actually vegetables. And I have to say I’ve been doing rather well on this one. Almost all of our meals have involved some form of veg, even if it is just peas from a tin, or some chopped up cherry tomatoes (yes, I’m aware that tomatoes are technically a fruit). And I’ve discovered that I actually like more healthy foods than I used to think I did. I swear parsnips taste different over here…
2. Think before I speak! Well, I have at least been trying… That counts, right?
3. Improve my translation style. I went to a seminar that I hoped would help with this. It turned out to be useless. Oh well, I still have another 8 months to get someone to compliment me on a translation well done…
4. Visit my friend in the Netherlands. Done! After a mere three years I finally made it to Delft. And I loved it! 🙂 Read all about my trip here.
5. Keep up with my blog. I shall let you be the judge of this one, dear readers…

For those who missed the original resolutions post, you can find it here.

The obligatory resolutions post…

Wow, fourteen  days into the new year already and I haven’t even mentioned resolutions yet! That must be some kind of record!  But, of course, I do have some. I wouldn’t be me if I didn’t make some kind of resolution for the new year! And obviously they can’t possibly be official until the whole world knows about them. Or at least that part of the world that reads my blog…
After years and years of setting myself vague and probably not even achieveable goals (“be a better girlfriend”, “learn social competence”), this time I decided to go with things that I might actually be able to stick with. So here goes:

1. Eat more healthily! This doesn’t mean giving up chocolate and cheese (mmmm, cheese!) and all the other yummy yet fattening stuff that I love. But I do want to make an effort to cook us healthier meals… ones that contain actual *gasp* vegetables. (To be fair, I’m not actually that bad to start with, but I do want to start making more meals in which vegetables are the main component rather than an afterthought). I’ve already got off to a good start on this one, as our meal of “vegetable ratatouille” from the other day will testify. Mmm, doesn’t it look delicious! And it was, believe me. I’ve got a whole load of other healthy recipes to try out as well. Last nights effort was roasted aubergine – basically aubergine stuffed using the bits of itself that I chopped out of the middle and yellow peppers with chunks of (low fat) goat’s cheese sprinkled over it. Sorry, no pictures of that one!

   

   Vegetable ratatouille

2. Think before I speak! A large proportion of my problems come from me opening my mouth without engaging my brain first. Whether it’s an argument with my boyfriend, a sarcastic comment that came out sounding really, really bad (entirely unintentional!) or another instance of me interrupting someone without even realising… if I could just control my impulse to just say whatever pops into my head immediately many things would be so much simpler.
3. Improve my translation style. I am a pretty good translator (even if I say it myself). My texts are generally correctly translated and read pretty well. But I quite often receive corrected texts back from my proofreaders in which most of what’s been corrected isn’t actual mistakes, but matters of style (using a different, nice sounding word, phrasing a sentence slightly differently…), and I have to admit most of the time their version really does sound a thousand times better. My goal for this year is to get at least one person to comment on how well one of my texts read, rather than just saying it was “fine”.
4. Visit my friend in the Netherlands! I’ve been meaning to go and see her since she moved there 3 years ago, and now she’s planning on relocating to the USA I really need to get my act together and go see her! (I’ve actually started arranging this one as well. We’ll probably be going there in February, so I can use up my remaining holiday from last year before it gets taken off me).
5. Keep up with my blog. I went through several periods of not blogging last year, mostly because I was busy actually having a life. Unfortunately this means I have no record whatsoever of some of the things I did last year. Obviously I still remember doing them (for now!), but I do like to have a written record that I can look back over occasionally. This year I really must try harder with that!

And that shall do. Five resolutions is enough for one year, don’t you think?

So this is the New Year…

We got back from Italy on Sunday and yesterday I was back at work. A little disconcerting going straight from being on holiday back to real life, but it was ok. And tomorrow I’m off again because it’s Three Wise King’s Day (or Epiphany as we English speakers tend to call it) which is a holiday here in Baden-Württemberg.

I actually have pretty high hopes for 2010. I wasn’t dreading going back to work yesterday (which, as some of you will know, is a definite improvement over this time last year) and I’m quietly optimistic that I’ll still have a job once my probation period is over – unless of course I’ve just jinxed myself by mentioning it on my blog. As for other aspects of my life… well, I have plans, but nothing really concrete to tell you yet so we’ll just have to wait and see. I have a notion that things may be looking up though.

So… resolutions… having utterly failed miserable on all of last year’s I’ve decided it to keep it simple this time. So my resolution for 2010 is just to be better. Less selfish, less self-critical, more emotionally intelligent, a better girlfriend… whatever. Just a better me in some way, however small. Surely even I can cope with something as general as that?

I also plan to complete my dissertation this year, but that’s not so much a resolution as something that has to be done whether I like it or not – and which I’ll probably end up doing all in one weekend right before the due date but let’s not talk about that for now…

A very happy New Year to all of you.

Resolution Recap

It’s almost June already. How the heck did that happen? Surely it was only just January?
Anyway… since we are now nearing the sixth month of the year I thought it would be a good idea to dig out my new year’s resolutions and let you all know how I’m doing with them. Goodness knows why I though this was a good idea… perhaps I just like torturing myself?

Soo, resolution number 1 was to try and improve my relationship… to be a better girlfriend and try to make my boyfriend happy (God, remind me why I chose to make the hardest one number one?). I also said that I was going to give it a year, and if my relationship still wasn’t going anywhere I would leave – walk away and let Jan figure out exactly what it is he wants. Much as I would hate to do that, at the time it seemed like the most sensible solution.
Well… if this were a school report the verdict on that one would be “could try harder”. I have managed to be a little nicer… at least intermittently. And as long as I have access to the internet we seem to be arguing less. We’ve also managed to have the occasional talk about things without Jan either going silent or changing the subject and me either crying or shouting, neither of which has the desired effect. OK, so we’ve only managed that about twice, but that’s still two more times than zero. And I still have the rest of the year to work on this…

Number 2 was to become better at work. This mostly involved becoming more emotionally intelligent, less socially incompetent and a good project manager.
The least said on this one the better (mostly because I don’t like to say too much about work on here just in case). I do still have a job though, which is something. And I seem to have got better at pretending not to be utterly terrified when phoning customers. Now I suppose I just have to work on not being utterly terrified.

Number 3. Stop procrastinating. Don’t leave university assignments til the last minute. Actually do the reading that’s set for each week.
I have now actually handed in the assignments for my last two modules, so this one isn’t relevant any more (unless I fail text lingusitics, in which case it will become horribly relevant again soon). But with those two assignments I did exactly what I told myself I wasn’t going to do… left them til the last minute, rushed to buy some books in a complete panic and just about managed to get them finished in time for the hand in date. I think we can write that one off as a big fat FAIL! And next year is thesis time. I already have my suspicions about how that’s going to turn out…

The fourth and final resolution was to get out more and meet up with actual rela live people instead of socialising entirely through my blog and facebook.
I don’t think I really need to tell you how this one is going. I mean, you lot read my blog, right? How many times have you seen me mention a night out or a meeting with friends? My point exactly… (Although I did meet up with a friend on Friday night. She moved to the Netherlands 5 months ago and I hadn’t seen her since so of course I made the effort. And I went to the Maifest at my old student residence. But other than that not much socialising going on over here… especially since my flat became connected to the internet).

Well, that’s the lot. Now you tell me how you’ve been getting on with your resolutions. Only if you’ve failed miserably though… you wouldn’t want to depress me now, would you? 😉

New Year’s Resolutions I didn’t make this year but probably should have…

• Try to be in bed (with lights out) by 10:30pm at least once a week.
• Stop spending 3-4 hours every evening reading blogs and facebooking them complaining you never have time to do anything
• Get some exercise – and no the moring walk to the tram stop does not count.
• Do something with your weekends that doesn’t involve the internet (admittedly I went food shopping and tidied my room – including hoovering – this weekend but that isn’t quite the kind of activities I meant).
• Stop eating so much junk food before you turn into a giant chocolate bar and get munched to death by someone even greedier than you. Might teach you a lesson if that did happen though. Ha!
• Do laundry more often.
• Eat more some small amount of fruit.